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Baths: Flowing

The most dynamic live performances are often about muscle memory and getting “hands-on” - not necessarily a simple task when your instrument is a laptop. Working with Ableton Live and an Akai MPD32 controller, Will Wiesenfeld, aka Baths, has developed his own passionate performance style. “[Ableton Live and the MPD32] allow for a kind of physicality with the music that I wouldn’t otherwise have,” explains Will. “I can keep it an actual performance, as opposed to just pressing the space bar.” Check out a sample of Will’s live set, plus a look at how he does it, below:

“The functionality of my live set is mostly working with effects in time with the music,” says Will. For his Baths set, Will separates his tracks into four or five stem channels, with four instances of Live’s Beat Repeat on each stem. He assigns global controls to the pitch, pitch decay, and grid settings of the Beat Repeats, and further uses a series of delays and reverbs for his live effect-mashing. Transitions are an essential part of Will’s live set: “My biggest sort of trick with the live set is my crossfading, because I’m able to fade out from a song with a lot of compression, switch the compression off while the track is faded out, then fade back to a song with no compression. It all works very seamlessly.”